


Take Me With You

by abbichicken (orphan_account)



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Bloodplay, Cutting, Dark, Introspection, Knifeplay, M/M, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-13
Updated: 2011-07-13
Packaged: 2017-10-21 08:54:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/223370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/abbichicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An exercise in stupidity and introspection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Me With You

If he could put it into words, Danny thinks, _take me with you_ would about cover it. There's a shift in Steve's gaze when something hurts - either of them, either way, from the outside in it looks the same - that moves from here, them, the situation, to something only Steve can see and feel, something inside himself and far away all at once, that doesn't translate into anything Danny can put his finger on. Pain - caused, felt, only in private, only between them - flips invisible switches in Steve's body; he can feel it, sense it, but...he doesn't get it.

Danny wonders sometimes if it's just Steve, or if there was A Thing he doesn't know about, if it's all that _I was held as a child, honest_ or what, deep-rooted crises or something dark and nasty in the past that's given him this reaction, that sparks up the flare in his eyes, makes him come when Danny knows he could keep it up for hours yet if he wanted to, makes him slaver like something wild with no table manners when confronted with an excess of pain at just the right moment.

There's no consultation, but Danny never feels anything but complicit. It's been, what, a couple of months. It's not all the time, much less every time, but sometimes Danny likes to look Steve right in the eye and provoke him into a fight, and once a couple of punches have been thrown, it's taken like green lights for whatever.

And whatever has been good, fun, fucking amazing, but _what's it all about_. Today, Steve, cold and quiet and elsewhere for much of the afternoon, hasn't said all that much to him, and Danny knows that if he pushes him right now, it would all be fine and Steve would get his kicks and they'd both get off and that would be good, but, he wants more. He wants to get...whatever Steve gets. Whatever it is that leaves him looking all languid and calm and...exorcised, or something, and he wants to know where that comes from and what it means and how they can use that and, fuck it, he just wants to understand. Danny's not used to not understanding something in someone; takes him ages to get past it, longer still to let it go.

He finishes the fourth beer Steve's given him, and wanders into the kitchen to find another. Dutch courage, and all that. He has a plan, for this conversation.

He bottles the plan when Steve comes back. It just...how can you start that kind of conversation?

In a move that, much later, when he embarrasses himself into thinking about this most peculiar of evenings, convinces him that he has spent more time with McGarrett than is healthy or wise, Danny eventually, impulsively, halfway through a conversation that verges on flirtatious, pulls a kitchen knife from the block and, with only the most fractional of hesitations, because there's no point in making excessive gestures if you hesitate, pulls it along his forearm like he's cutting a tomato. Steve's expression turns to horror even before the knife gets to skin, puts out a hand as he cuts, saying lots of "Don't - fuck...not like...I just sharpened...I don't want...fuck's sake...no, that's going to be a problem now, why d'you have to..."

Looking down at his arm, which doesn't, he finds, hurt in the slightest, Danny notices that that did indeed go like cutting a tomato - shit's gone _everywhere_. There's way more blood than he expected, for starters. This quickly feels like a wasted gesture.

Steve doesn't look anything like interested, or impressed, no, he looks fucking _off_ and concerned, like that was the point, oh, _why am I such a jerk_ , Danny wonders, trying very hard to turn back time by sheer force of will. "See this," Danny says, "this whatever it is on your face, that's how I feel...sometimes...looking at you right after I punch you in the face, or after you're knocking me about, or, like, about that time when you're admiring your teethmarks in my shoulder or something. I don't get it."

There must, he thinks, be a way to shift this back to where he wanted it to be, so that it'll play out as the intimate thing he'd imagined, this is what he's aiming for with the above, but everything he'd hoped to be investigating is just...not there. Steve looks like other people look when they get slapped; what Danny was after was what Steve looks like when he gets slapped.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Steve asks, five times in a row in three different tones without breathing in between, sounding most unlike himself.

"I just thought I'd let you know, y'know, I was open to...whatever, knives, I mean, you don't have to..."

"I don't play with knives. We don't play with knives, okay?"

Danny takes a step closer where there isn't really a step to be had; gets right up in his face, not easy, given the height difference, but surprisingly effective, as Steve gets marvellously edgy if you interfere with what he considers personal space. Steve's definitive, belitting tone is guaranteed to irritate him, especially when's he's trying to be all close and that.

"Why not, it's not like you've got any other limitations..."

"We don't play with knives, Daniel," Steve is horribly serious, crazy serious, electrically...serious... "because I don't know how to stop."

Danny has never wanted him so fucking much.

He really, really wants to stop talking, and just, fucking jump the bastard, because he's breathless with the...intensity of that...and there is something about what's happening to his arm that's leaving him feeling really quite...interesting...but he's spent a lot of time contemplating the talking, and he really ought to make an effort to go through with this so...

"I just thought, maybe we could..." _why are the words abandoning me, hey?_ He takes a step back "...I mean, we're not so different, I just, want to know what it is you..."

Steve's shaking his head. _Why is he shaking his head? This whole thing is fucking stupid. Tie yourself up, Daniel, and fucking go home._

"Look, I don't want to fuck myself," Steve says, gentle as if he's talking someone down, "If I wanted to fuck myself, there's a mirror and the...uh...anyway, that's not the-"

Danny grins, grateful for any break in the what-the-fuck he's orchestrated "Wait, wait wait...you're so finishing that sentence...mirror and the what now?"

"None of your fucking business, do you want to have this out or not?" Steve looks so annoyed, then, Danny fears he might just as well walk out the door of his own place and leave him standing there bleeding to fucking death or whatever. _Note to self: Steve is impenetrable. Mentally. Do not try and undo him._

As he moves a fraction of an inch, Danny's arm releases another stream of blood onto the floor.

"Yeah, you need stitches," Steve says, sighs, giving up the anger, looking, resigned, at the mess on the floor. "Out of here..." He takes Danny by the good arm, and yanks him into the other room, away from all sharp things.

"Fucking great, what am I going to say to the hospital?"

"Oh, you're not going to the hospital..." There's that look. There it is. Just for a second, but Danny sees it. _There_.

"Nooooo, no, no...oh, no...."

"Yes, Danny, yes..."

"No way..."

"I'm trained in this..."

"Is there anything you are not trained in? Crochet? Ballet?"

"I do a mean arabesque..." Steve deflects, shoving Danny down onto the armchair. "Keep your arm up whilst I find a needle, and don't bleed on the upholstery..."

"Oh you're fucking kidding..." but Danny knows he isn't, not at all, because Steve looks all proud of himself when he makes any kind of joke, and he's not doing that right now. Danny's got that sinking, blushing sense of this all being very fucking stupid in the light of day, with the heat taken out of the moment he'd wound himself into, but, at least Steve's looking a lot less serious. For a moment he thinks he can hear him whistling as he goes through a cupboard. Isn't that just nice...

"Now, nothing to worry about," says Steve, advancing with a threaded needle and a swab, fresh from the wrapping, "it's going to be fine..."

"Yes, nurse..."

"Another thing of yours? I mean, we can play it that way if you like..."

"Stop changing the subject...can we? No, fucking, don't do that...I don't know what I'm saying right now... Fuck, do you have to do this? Can't you just tie it up?"

"Sure, Danny, sure, and we can get some maggots to eat out the gangrene in a couple of weeks' time, too, if you like..."

"Oh fucking hell, don't, why would you say that? Why?"

"That's the consequence of leaving a cut that deep to fester."

"I'm surprised you aren't going to lick it clean, or something, I mean, that was my point in the first place..."

"That was your point? I don't want you to make that point again, don't do that again. That's just...not something we need to discuss. Anyway, again, that deep, you'll get infected."

"I thought it was natural, or something..."

"Natural?" Steve's eyes widen increasingly as the conversation goes on, and Danny feels very, very small.

"Yeah, you know, like, foxes lick wounds clean, or whatever."

"Foxes?"

"Or whatever."

"Okay, enough. I'm going to stitch you up now. You can keep talking if you really want, but you're probably better biting down on something."

"I'm still not sure..."

"I can hit a perforated lung with foliage; a bit of sewing isn't going to be a problem, I can assure you..."

"Don't I at least get some whisky first?" Danny asks, feeling slightly green, blames it on the blood loss and general weirdness of the situation. "Patients always get whisky before home surgery in films."

"We're not in a film, and I definitely don't think you should drink any more right now," Steve says, businesslike. "Have this instead,", shoving a piece of _is that leather? Leather would be good...oh, no, it's oily rag. Thanks, Steve_ into Danny's mouth, and he bites right into it, enclosing it around his teeth, feeling it dampen and swell and gag at the back of his tongue. He focuses on its unfamiliar taste, and doesn't look as Steve gets to it.

 _It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt at all. It's weird, and it turns his stomach slightly, as the thread draws through, but it's bearable. After the first few stab-and-pulls, he sucks up the spit at the back of the gag and gets up the courage to look at Steve._

 _At total odds to everything, there it is, there, in the concentration at the back of Steve's expression. He looks ravenous, fixated, methodical, and excited, looks like _I can't believe this is happening_ every bit the same as he does when he's got Danny on his back, strained and contorted and always so obliging._

 _Take me there._

But, Danny realises, as he looks at Steve from cold, rather than from underneath him, in the throes of his own aching and want, that Steve can't, and, crucially, won't share what's in his head, or his veins, or whatever with him. Not in words.

The last three whips of thread tie it up, and each stitch is perfectly even, the flesh already drawn together.

Steve swipes up the final bead of blood with his finger, and sits back, looks _bang_ into Danny's eyes and licks it.

"You need to eat more greens," he says, "spinach, cabbage, you know, stuff that doesn't come on pizza."

Danny spits out the rag in his mouth. "What the _fuck_ , I don't...want to know...what..." He doesn't say _what's wrong with you_ because, whilst that's something he so often has cause to ask of Steve, this feels so essential and so deep and so tangled, that 'wrong' is the kind of concept that just can't apply.

"You need more iron," Steve explains, obliging and informative. "I can taste it."

"I'm amazed at how often I want you to stop talking, considering that I like the sound of your voice only marginally less than the sound of my own," Danny refutes, hopelessly, keeping up appearances, playing the game, heart thumping too-quick from the way Steve's looking at him, like, not only would he lick him within an inch of his life, he'd fucking devour him if he'd let himself off the leash.

Danny concludes, as his insides spin with desire and undigested adrenaline, that he doesn't need taking anywhere.

When Steve looks like _that_ , whenever he goes wherever it is, whatever he's feeling, that distance that Danny can't bridge however close, however inside he gets, however awkward or tangled or tight together their position, that he can't get everything Steve is...that's what makes this work.

That's what makes this the turn-on it is. Danny doesn't, he finds, want to go deeper in his own brain and thrash out why it's working for him, why it is that _because_ he doesn't trust Steve 100%, doesn't trust that every time they wrap themselves in teeth and heat and fists and nails it's awakening something in Steve that not only he can't know or understand, but that Steve himself doesn't know or understand _or have any control over_ and it's that danger, that completely consensual, permissive danger, that, Danny realises, as Steve kisses him, demanding, moving on, lips both completely selfish, and still tainted with the taste of drying blood, that is what sends him into his hapless state of willingness, of absolute thrill and spark.

"I'm not going to fuck you," Steve says, after a minute, pulling away, leaving Danny licking his lips, on the way to hard and just thinking that he was going to get a shot at redemption.

"Huh?" Danny says, looking just slightly more pathetic than he would've chosen to, if he'd planned his response.

"It'd be like rewarding you for trying to play me. Can't have that."

Danny goldfishes as Steve wanders off into the kitchen, explaining there's one hell of a mess to clean up, because he's really got too much going on inside him now to formulate a useful response. _Rewarding, fucking...who does he think he is..._ but even as the thought forms, it dissipates, because Danny knows that Steve thinks he is exactly what he is: in charge of this.

Danny chastises himself, later, for even trying to analyse what happens when they're alone. He's used to being clear and up-front but this part of his life doesn't need to be that. Part of what makes fucking Steve as absolutely obvious and necessary as it seems to be is that when it's happening he isn't an ex-husband, a father, a cop, whatever, he doesn't feel like anything except flesh and blood, feels like a thing, like something useful, like something that gives by virtue of being there, and Danny doesn't actually care about what happens to him under Steve when they're not at work; he doesn't...have to think, or care at all. He lets go. He doesn't need to go anywhere, he doesn't need to screw out a demon or punch out his stress, he just needs to give it up sometimes, to not be going _anywhere_. Steve seems to hold on to whatever it is; Danny just lets it all wash over him.

Maybe he doesn't get what Steve gets, but ( _thank fuck_ ) he isn't Steve, and he didn't survive on toothpaste for three weeks in Geneva (it wasn't Geneva, it was Georgia, because Geneva doesn't have much call for the US navy, but Danny just, doesn't care enough to remember such things accurately) and he doesn't have a screw loose that lets him leap from common fucking sense to absolute lunacy without so much as blinking, but if he was like that - and it occurs to Danny that Steve has spent god only knows how long with a lot of people who were probably just like that - then there's every chance that Steve would be just as _professional_ with him as he is with everyone else.

Presuming he isn't fucking everyone else backwards and sideways as well, of course, which Danny's 99% sure he isn't...only 99% sure, mind...he's not a jealous person, not really, but his own long-ago-wounded self-esteem likes to play the game of "they'll all leave you eventually" from time to time, so he does keep half an eye on Chin, for example, who had a rather nasty bruise, coincidentally not that long after he and Steve were out somewhere doing something together for some time. He's watching.

It occurs to Danny, as these thoughts trace, unfinished, through his mind, that there's every chance that they, as much as anything else, are to blame for things like his own inadequate desire to prove himself to Steve even when he wasn't in question. _He chose you, remember?_ Danny settles on, as a quick mantra to ride out the residual awkwardness that Steve doesn't seem to feel in the slightest, returning with "I'm not even going to touch you," handing him an open beer, flicking the TV on, and sitting, very deliberately, on the other side of the room.

Steve sucks him off, later, in bed. "I wasn't kidding, though," he says, quietly, once he's swallowed the results of his prowess and moved back up to be eye-to-eye with him. "This," he grips Danny's arm, and Danny flinches ( _and there's the thing in Steve's eyes, even in the dark, even in the smallest of things_ ) is pretty, and that's fine, but we don't do that. I mean, you can do that, if you want, I'm not your fucking keeper, I just don't want to see it."

"Why?" Danny asks, sleepily, last-ditch, clicking that maybe this is actually what it's all about, realising only as the syllable is out of his mouth that he's ignoring every epiphany he's had over the evening,

"You never need to know," Steve says "and I'm never going to tell you, even if you put a gun to my head, so, just, drop it."

"Will you tell me about the thing with the mirror then?"

"What thing?"

"Don't, that won't work, you know what thing..."

"Go to sleep, Danny."

"Seriously, tell me about the thing with the mirror..."

"If you're good, I'll show you one day..."

"Now you're just making it sound more exciting than it is, right? It's a feather or a glove or something lame, isn't it?"

Steve grins.

"Go to sleep."

It takes ten days for the wound to stop weeping and cracking, fourteen days for Chin and Kono to stop teasing him about the "accident" Steve explains Danny's had (no consultation, no, he goes straight into his own perfectly-delivered coverup with just enough slapstick and insult to make it sound absolutely plausible). It takes three months for the stitches to dissolve completely and the scar, well, that'll probably be there forever, but Danny likes that. Steve's body is a patchwork, if you look closely at it, and Danny does, as often as he can, so, even if he's not going to underestimate the sharpness of Steve's culinary implements again, he's not averse to trying to catch up a little in the war wound stakes. Even if this war is only of their own, private, unspoken construct; the kind that no-one ever wins.


End file.
